Kayaking Siberia's Untamed River

Kayaking Siberia's Untamed River

Adventurers Amber Valenti and Krystle Wright are half of the all-women team that traveled 2,700 miles down the Amur River through the wilds of Mongolia and Russia. Along the way, they pushed their minds and bodies to the limit and learned that the journey planned is rarely the journey taken.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

Amber: The concept became to travel the length of the Amur River, from its Mongolian headwaters out to the Pacific Ocean. It was a challenging time and a joyful time all at once. It's the kind of place that makes you feel closer to yourself and closer to something a lot bigger than you.

Hi, it's so great to be here with all of you tonight. I'm really excited and I know Krystle will agree, to be in this room, sharing stories from a trip that has been really meaningful to both of us. So, 60 percent of the world's great rivers are dammed at this point. One of my inspirations was getting curious about some of these big rivers, that are still free-flowing, that are left on our planet. And I came across this list of the ten longest free-flowing rivers that still existed on our planet. But there was one name that I had never heard of before, and it was the Amur River. This place has leopards, tigers still there. It has the largest Salmonidae fish in the world. Not only that, it had not a single dam on its entire length.

So, this river is almost 3,000 miles long, and that would be like paddling from New York to San Francisco and not seeing a single dam. And then, not to mention, it started in this incredible part of Mongolia, in this wild, wild part of northern Mongolia. And then traversed all the way through southern Siberia, through some incredibly wild country, to the Pacific Ocean. So, with that and all that information that we gathered, the Nobody's River project was born. The concept became to travel the length of the Amur River by whatever means we could, from its Mongolian headwaters, all the way through southern Siberia, along the border of China and Russia, out to the Pacific Ocean.

So, this is our team of wild women that I slowly assembled. And the one with the blonde pigtails, that's Becca Dennis, and then, in the straw hat, that's Sabra Purdy. I am next to Sabra and on the far end is Krystle. So, Becca is now a nursing student and a Grand Canyon guide, and is just this incredible woman on the water in her own right. And her and I met guiding on the Tuolumne River in California. That same summer that I met Becca she was falling in love with this guy named Zach Orman. And I've loved them dearly ever since. This is Sabra Purdy. She is a river ecologist. And I've never seen anybody get so excited about water quality measures. Invertebrates, slimy things in the river. It was truly her passion. The last piece of the puzzle was a photographer. I really think that Krystle introduces herself best.

Krystle: This is f****** incredible what I am seeing. I keep trying to film a f****** lightning strike and every time I put the camera down, it f****** goes off. Every f****** time. And I say **** about ten times in every sentence. - Piece of *****...

Hello. Now, you might ask where did I get that language. And if you Skype with my mom, you'll find out pretty fast. So, Amber... Yeah, Amber was our leader on this trip. This was her sort of brainchild, but I think Amber could be one of the best expedition leaders that I have been with. Someone with an amazing pallet of skills. You know, everything from remote medicine... ...to raging dance parties, anywhere: Mongolian fields, Russian bloody towns, bad Chinese disco, - Russian restaurants-

Oh, that was good. We thought everything was just going to happen smoothly, but like any adventure, it doesn't. But all you need to know right now is that on June 1st we were in Ulaanbaatar. And here was our first night with the horsemen, and we're thrown right into the thick of their culture. And basically, the next day, we were going to head out into the wilderness with these guys. They were gonna lead us to the headwaters of the Onon River. We tried to make conversation. It was a little tricky. We had a little Lonely Planet guide, pointing out words. And, of course, we brought our maps. We brought the GPS units so we were trying to encourage them to use our equipment. It's amazing when you can't talk to someone how much you still can connect with them. Especially by the simple gestures, but thankfully we did have Manejalf, who we liked to call Manji. And he was there to help us translate, 'cause we definitely got into some hairy situations where we really needed that translation. You couldn't just wing it and hope for the best.

This moment here we're told, “Oh, by the way, our eight-year-old's just broke-in these horses for you. We don't use them so much any more because of the motorcycles.” So, just to get you all oriented, from Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, we drove around for about two days, to where we could meet the horse-packers and then we were riding horses into the headwaters. There's very, it's very difficult to access that area. And at the headwaters, if we could make it there with our kayaks and all of our gear, we would begin our trip.

Krystle: And here, this is Amber and Sabra trying to psych each other up, saying, this is fun, this is going to work out totally good. These horses are wild, but we got this, we got this, right? The eight-year-olds broke them for us, it's all good. So, we spent three days, and we rode for about 60 kilometers deep into the Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area. Some of the most pristine, yet inhabitable, wilderness that I've ever seen. It's so stunning, you can almost imagine that humanity never existed there.

So, the next part of this story is always really difficult for me to tell. It has never gotten any easier and so what I think I am going to do for this is show you guys a couple-minute clip from the film. Amber: It's hard to share this news without overshadowing all the beauty of Zach Orman, Becca's love and partner for the last five years. Just three weeks after our trip to Arizona, Zach journeyed forward into the great mystery. Strangely enough, he was flying, paragliding in Tucson. When Becca called that Sunday night he had already passed on. Words can never describe how hard this has been. And I can only imagine what this feels like for his family and for Becca. Grief is a journey no one would choose. But one thing is certain, Becca has taught me more about courage in a couple of months then perhaps I've learned in my entire life. And it's because of her courage that we're here in Mongolia now.

That was hard to watch. So, just like that, we're preparing for this huge trip and one of the closest people to us passes away. But somehow Becca decided that she still wanted to go to Mongolia. And all of us unanimously agreed that if she wanted to go, no matter how bad she was grieving, that we would support that and we would still go do this trip. And so that landed us back in Mongolia. So, yeah, we paddled about 500 kilometers through northern Mongolia. Like I said, in one of the most pristine and beautiful places I have ever, ever been. There were a couple of different sections of the Onon that we paddled, but this upper section that you see here... The estimate that we've gotten of how many people have seen it, is ten. And the river is flowing completely unobstructed and with very-- or almost no influence from humanity. It's pretty incredible, this is one of my favorite photos because it gives the feeling of how magical that place was.

Krystle: We also encountered the Mongolian military. Try and remain calm, it's all good. And, Manji-- This is one situation where you want a translator, for sure. So, Manji and Amber first go off. And the rest of us were just sitting there, we're just waiting, being patient. And then we all get escorted away. And no cameras. So, we were held up for six hours in a military camp. I felt like we were a bit of excitement for them, you know, they don't see much action out there. But-- They were making up excuses as to why we needed to be detained. We got to play some great games with the children all day.

But... we... At this point here, this is, you know, we break down the kayaks and they need to make sure we're not Russian spies. And funnily enough, it's the solar panel equipment that you see there, that they were the most worried about. And the reason why I am taking the image right now, I've got-- holding the camera down, and I casually just take the card out. Put yesterday's card in, so when they came over, They were like, “Oh, we need to look at your images.” I had to scroll through every single image on that card. So, a good thousand images of just kayaking and pretty places. And thankfully, we did not get caught, because apparently, Manji, he was telling us that we actually could've gone to jail. It turns out we thought we had the right permits. We went through some logistics there in Mongolia, you know, legal, and we thought we did have the right permits but they were telling us that we didn't. And we could have had a very different outcome to that day.

I don't think we really had any more dramas until... Here's our lightning scenario. And we're camping on this river bar and you can see the river splitting around us. And, you know, I start wading out further and further, it was quite shallow, and I'm like, “This is amazing.” So, I start shooting and I get my tripod because I wanted to get a lightning strike. And, you know, I wasn't really paying attention to how fast that storm was coming on. And suddenly Amber and I were joking around, and then Amber is like, “Krystle, I'm not really comfortable with you being in that water anymore.” And I'm like, “Nah, it's all good.” You know, just one more strike and I promise I'll get out. Next thing, the loudest thunder just rips above us and I'm sprinting out of that water as fast as I could. And I threw the tripod down right beside the tent and we all ran for the willows, because by the time I had got out of the water, threw that tripod down, this lightning strike goes off just on the other side of the river, about a 100 meters away. And it was like, “Ooh, ****, okay, this is serious.” And we hid in the willows for a good two hours because, what you can't see in this image to the left is, there's a huge cliff that was the highest point in the area. And the storm basically was attracted to that cliff. And it would stay there, raging above us for a couple of hours. And we were trying to seek shelter, and not get struck.

Amber: We originally had wanted to paddle from, you know, Mongolia, straight through the border into Russia and onward into the ocean. That was our dream, past the Chinese-Russian border. But we quickly learned after research and connecting with people, that without $50,000 in bribe money or a private security detail that there was no way we were going to get into that area. In particular, in the last ten years it's become very, very tight, that border there, and more and more dangerous to be there. There were all sorts of military activities going on. And so, being, you know, the wise thinkers that we are, we thought, Well, I don't know if that's worth it. Maybe we should just take out in the border-- at the border, and take a train. So, with that said, here we are. We are about to take off the Mongolian section of the paddle and then drive back to Ulaanbaatar and then take the train around.

Krystle: So, we are going back across the Steppes. We were pretty glad to spend the night here in the ger. We were welcomed in, they shared their food. And they also shared their home-brewed vodka. Basically, it's home-brewed from fermented milk. And-- Mare's milk. A shot's not a shot. A shot is a teacup. So, it's not just like... knock it back. It's like, gulp, gulp, gulp. And our driver, very cheeky, would have the saucepan, kept pouring us a teacup, kept going round and round. And after a few, I was like, “You know what, I am actually not feeling too good about this. I am going to go to bed.” And I remember leaving the ger and you three were like, “Ah, Krystle can't handle it. She's going to bed, you know, she's weak.” And I am like, “Oh, we'll see.” And, so, I woke up really early the next morning. And, next thing you know this little herd of baby goat and sheep loved our tent. They climbed it multiple times. All the meanwhile, there's three ladies inside with a hell of a hangover. I won that battle.

And then, just as we got back to Ulaanbaatar, um, Becca was bombarded with all of these phone calls from worried family and friends, and all these images of Zach on social media, and... She-- It was intense, she had spent this entire month in a really quiet place and I think had gone deeper and deeper into a journey of grief. And when we got back to Mongolia-- excuse me, to Ulaanbaatar, she suddenly realized that it was time for her to start a different journey. And so she decided to go home. As you can imagine, this is a huge shake-up for all of us. So there are a lot of emotions and I think it was a really melancholy transition for us. Really, kind of, the up and down nature of this trip. And at that same time, with all of these nerves we're hopping on a train to Russia and we're about to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway, with an expedition's worth of gear for ten days.

Krystle: And going to Russia is definitely a culture shock. And I've been to Moscow, and the far-east Russia is totally different. It's like a whole new country. And as we're travelling in the train, we see these style of buildings that remind you of the Soviet era. And also a lot of the buildings are just torn down in rubble, so it makes you wonder, you know, was this a result of the war? And we also started to realize how gnarly the weather gets. Like, these monsoonal storms are now in full rage. And here, the rain is just pelting down, and I remember the lightning going off. And I didn't actually hear the crack of the lightning. It hit this light post and it's like a big pop sound. And all the lights went out. Car alarms are going off. And this is like, “Whoa, this is... We're going to be in a river in potentially the same sort of storms?” So, it was a big wake up call to what we were getting ourselves into.

And this is the Amur River. Like, from Mongolia, when we got on the headwaters it was maybe seven meters wide. Imagine, you know, not even as wide as this stage and suddenly we're looking at anywhere from two to five kilometers wide. And by the time we get to the delta, it's 12 kilometers wide. So, when you picture a big oil-tanker or a massive ship like that, they look like a little Matchbox toy car on this river. It's... it's huge. Amber: So, we are on this concrete block in this industrial area, just before sunrise, packing up our kayaks and there's like cigarette butts, and glass and these big cranes, and the water is just gnarly. And we knew this water had DDT and benzene, and raw sewage in it, and that we were beginning a really, really different part of the adventure. The Lower Amur, there was so much unknown. There were corrupt officials there, there was organized crime around the extraction industry there. There was a type of weather that we weren't used to dealing with. I mean, these monsoon storms could kick up in a half-hour to an hour. And all of a sudden there would be 80-kilometer per hour winds and lightning everywhere. And not to mention you couldn't actually get out of the river just anywhere. So, often at times on one side of the river there'd be these willow fences. So, it was just willow and marsh. And on the other side of the river would be ten-foot loose dirt cut banks. And then there's the bugs.

Krystle: This is my ankles, by the way. It was crazy because the mosquitoes come out at dusk, you go to sleep with a chorus of mosquitoes singing to you. And then you wake up, they're still there, but you think, “Oh, yeah, the sun's gonna come up, we're going to be on the river, we'll get away from them. It's all good.” And then there's gnats. The gnats like to come out at sunrise. And they will stick with you the whole day. You'll be wearing these nets and you can see them crawling in front of your eyes and then they actually wiggle through. Like, they were that tiny but they could do damage. Don't mean to gross you out, but imagine, you know, I make my hot chocolate 'cause I can't drink coffee. And, you know, pick 'em out. Pick out about 20, not exaggerating here. And then I start sipping and I feel a bit of a clump. I'm like, “Oh, hey, there's more mosquitoes.” So, I fish out another 20, so, it's like, that was a morning ritual. I was losing my mind.

Amber: But somewhere on the Lower Amur we were planning to paddle 1,000 kilometers. Somewhere along the way I started to get a really sick feeling in my stomach. And I said, “I think we need to take off at our halfway point.” And that halfway point was sort of the last spot that we could take out before it was like a no-turning around situation, before we delve deeper into the wilderness and the weather was going to be getting more intense, the monsoon weather, and our

sat-phone wasn't working. And all the translators that were supposed to paddle with us had bailed. And... There were all of these things, these logical reasons, but no matter how much I logic through it I really just had this sick feeling in my gut. And so, halfway through our objective on the Lower Amur, we took off, in the city of Komsamosk. And we really weren't sure if we were making the right choice.

Krystle: One thing about landing on that beach as well, we met this lady who happened to speak perfect English, and she said to us, you know, “Why would you come to a place that even God forgot?” And that's probably one thing that's always stuck with me, because even though, I mean, Komsamosk is a pretty big city, but in far-east Russia you're still very, very much disconnected from the world.

Amber: So, we did end up making it to the ocean, though. But it ended up being much less romantic than my image. My image was like paddling into the Amur Delta on a beautiful clear day, wind in our hair and... you know, we were just like, total summit moment. But we ended up just taking a ferry. We were able to find a local ferry and it took us a day to get downstream, and then we hitchhiked the rest of the way. So, we hitchhiked the rest of the way and we ended up in this old fishing village that was sort of falling in on itself, and we quickly realized we were the only people that this place mattered to. And for us it meant something very different than it did for everybody else. It was the end of this really long, powerful journey... and the end of a dream that we had wanted to see through.

Krystle: And this is the image of us leaving Russia. We flew back to Alaska. And you can see, like, it's a big, big river. And, basically, about a week later we find out the greatest flood in 120 years actually hit the region. When they showed the before and after images. What we were paddling looked like a creek on a map. And you know now, this thing is pretty big. Because there's no big mountains, it's quite flat, it was like 50 kilometers wide, and that's a lot of water to be moving

around. So, thankfully Amber's intuition was on target.

Amber: So, this is a cairn we built for Zach over the Onon River. We found a lot of little ways to celebrate him as we went. He was such a vibrant, vibrant human being and he was always laughing and dancing, and just in the flow of his life. And so, I think if there is anything that I've learned in his life and in his passing, it's that no matter how hard what we face in our life is, no matter how crazy and difficult things get, there is always something for us to celebrate. And I think that's what we really tried to do in Mongolia and on this trip.

Kayaking Siberia's Untamed River

Adventurers Amber Valenti and Krystle Wright are half of the all-women team that traveled 2,700 miles down the Amur River through the wilds of Mongolia and Russia. Along the way, they pushed their minds and bodies to the limit and learned that the journey planned is rarely the journey taken.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.